Feeling Your Oats exhibition features six artists expanding the sexual boundaries of traditional bachelor and bachelorette parties through video performance, interactive sculpture, painting, ceramics, and fiber. The exhibit is a wild ride of sexual freedom and celebration, which is particularly essential as U.S. politicians rapidly move to revoke trans, queer, and reproductive rights, and sex education. Forget the licentious bachelor and penis-clad bachelorette parties of the past and rev your engines with artists who are breaking new ground on personal pleasure, erotic fun, artistic expression and redefining what it means to party and celebrate the body and self.

The brouhaha bachelor party dates back to ancient Greece. It was an uproarious affair of male companions congregating over sumptuous food and drink to indulge the body before its confinement to the marital bed. Toasting with friends, men used it as an occasion to satisfy the pleasure points of the body, sexually exploit the female form, and carouse with the antics of male toxicity under the guise of brotherhood. For two-thousand years, it remained the exclusive party privilege of heterosexual men.

The “free love” movement in the 1960s and accessibility of The Pill changed those party dynamics. Women demanded sex for pleasure and the right to party without shame! And so, the bawdy, modern invention of the bachelorette party welcomed in the age of penis paraphernalia. While a positive sign of women’s sexual gains that carved out public space for women to celebrate sex and their sexuality, this festivity is still stricken with unhealthy patriarchal toxicity and obsolete, puritanical, binary frameworks of sex, sexuality, desire, and power. The artists in Feeling Your Oats use affirmative consent and creativity to reinvent the power structure of the traditional b-party entertainment activities and represent a new, healthier renaissance of community-based sexual celebration.

By queering the post-dinner party politics, the artists are changing the direction and control of libidinous desire – emotional and physical longing that doesn’t exist only to serve a partner or society’s expectation of long-term companionate love. Even beyond the bedsheets, the artists’ transform sex and sexuality into controlled and self-appointed acts of performative artistry and personal expression. Feeling Your Oats redefines who is deserving of pleasure, recenters personal desire and intimacy, and breathes new life into public parties. Viewers are invited to the communal table of sexual delight to celebrate as equals and in their own right.

ARTISTS: Robert Chamberlin, Aubrey Longley-Cook, Katrina Majkut, Pearl Renken, Alexis Ruiseco Lombera, Sophia Wallace